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Early life in Boulder prepped Phinney for success, adversity

Born bolder

By Clay Evans Camera Staff Writer

Posted:
05/22/2011 01:00:00 AM MDT

Davis Phinney, a Boulder native and former professional cyclist, is now a Parkinson's disease advocate.
(
MARTY CAIVANO
)

As a small kid, Davis Phinney always felt a need to prove himself. Throughout his time at University Hill Elementary School in Boulder, the former pro bicycle racer was the undisputed sports king among his peers.

"Whenever it was track and field day, a big day in the spring, he'd basically walk off with blue ribbons in everything he entered," recalls long-time friend Neil King, Jr., who is now a Washington reporter for the Wall Street Journal. "He was built for speed and endurance from the beginning, and he was very determined."

So in 1972, when then-Baseline Junior High track coach Max McMillan asked boys' track participants who thought they were the fastest on the bleachers, Phinney threw his hand up. Nobody else did.

He was a seventh grader, 90 pounds and not even 5 feet tall, and full of confidence. He'd never been beaten.

"So (the coach) asked the question again, and this time four or five hands went up," -- including those of former high school superstars Mike Gallagher and Tom Zieske, recalls Phinney, 51.

The coach lined up his confident athletes at one end of a football field and sent them sprinting to the opposite end zone. Phinney held his own for 50 yards, but the other, bigger boys soon passed him and he quit running at 90 yards. He fought back tears as boys jeered him from the bleachers. That's when the coach taught Phinney a lesson he applied to everything he's done since.

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What: Boulder native and former pro bike racer Davis Phinney signs his new book, "The Happiness of Pursuit: A Father's Courage, a Son's Love, and Life's Steepest Climb"

"He says, 'Son, it's a wonderful thing to take pride in yourself and your abilities. ... But one thing you've got to remember, don't be so proud that when faced with losing you quit. The greatest success usually comes from people who don't quit,'" Phinney says as he sits at his kitchen table in north Boulder. "I've always remembered that. There were a lot of times in my life when I wanted to quit, but didn't."

That crucial lesson is the underlying theme of Phinney's new book, "The Happiness of Pursuit: A Father's Courage, a Son's Love, and Life's Steepest Climb." The memoir describes not only his cycling career -- he won stages of the Tour de France, an Olympic bronze medal and the Coors International, among other achievements -- but living with early-onset Parkinson's disease for almost two decades.

"(I)n bike racing, as in life, it's imperative never to renoncer a l'espoir -- to give up hope," he writes. "To concede, to abandon the race, is to miss out on those charged instances, those gratifying moments of victory, those few seconds that sustain us."

Known the world over as an athlete and more recently as a powerful advocate for Parkinson's research, Phinney is also a Boulder boy through and through.

Born in 1959 at Boulder Community Hospital to Damon and Thea Phinney, he grew up in a house on 6th Street and Aurora Avenue on University Hill, near where astronaut Scott Carpenter was raised. He remembers the turmoil of the '70s when University of Colorado students protested President Nixon's bombing of Hanoi, as well as watching Bobby Anderson scoring touchdowns for the Buffaloes.

"Our playground was the university," Phinney says.

His friends at the time read like a roll call of star prep athletes of the time -- Zieske, Gallagher, Heap, Feeney, Baker. But by 10th grade at Boulder High School, Phinney says his size limited his participation in traditional team sports. That's when he discovered cycling.

He and a friend, Peter Thron -- who, with his size and beard looked years older than Phinney -- decided after seeing Boulder's inaugural Red Zinger bike race in 1975, that they would become a team, Thron coaching and Phinney pedaling.

Davis Phinney, second from left, with daughter Kelsey, wife Connie and son Taylor. (MARTY CAIVANO)

"We would go down to the Hill at night in the fall, play pinball for awhile. Then (Peter) would say, 'OK Davis, it's time for a training ride.' We literally had jeans on and tennis shoes, 60/40 jackets. ... We'd ride Baseline to 75th to the Diagonal, then ride the Diagonal in from Niwot. At night. It was totally stupid," he says, laughing.

Thron also put Phinney through his paces with nighttime springs on the Hill. "I'd go ballistic, do five of these loops, the first one flat out, so half the time I couldn't do another. I didn't know anything about training."

He became friends with Tony Comfort, who changed his name to Antonio Comforti as an homage both to the spirit of European cycling and his family's pre-Ellis Island name, Conforte.

Comforti "was an eclectic dude," Phinney says. "It was awkward to walk around as a 15-year-old with shaved legs, a cycling cap and shorts with a tan line visible. ... He showed me it was OK to be different."

Ironically, just a few years later cycling style was so hip that non-riders shaved and donned Motobecane caps in hopes of impressing women during Coors International races in Boulder, Phinney says.

Never a great student, he bolted Boulder High without even turning in some of his final papers. After "about five minutes at CU," he abandoned that path for racing.

"Slowly but surely I made the national team and started going to Europe."

He won stages of the Tour de France as a member of the 7-Eleven team in 1986 and 1987 and finished 105th overall in 1988. He followed that up with points classification and stages wins at the Coors Classic, the Tour of the Americas and the Tour de Trump. In 1984 he was part of the American time trial team that took the Bronze medal.

"He's a super athlete, just driven and aggressive," says long-time friend John Metzger, found of Metzger and Associates in Boulder. "I think it made sense in hindsight who he became ... He's not a Type B athlete -- or person."

Phinney married Olympic gold medal cyclist Connie Carpenter in 1983, and the couple have two children. Kelsey is a 16-year-old junior at Boulder High who is looking toward an Ivy League college career. The meteoric cycling career of son Taylor, 20, who is racing -- and winning -- around the world, deeply informs the memoir.

Even after retiring in 1993 to become a TV cycling commentator, Phinney didn't give up his intense athletic regimen. He began to experience cramping and hand tremors.

"I was just wearing myself out. Little did I know I was starting to exhibit symptoms," he says.

His foot began cramping while running and soon he couldn't run at all. In 2000, he saw a neurologist.

Over time, the disease progressed from "being sometimes an annoyance to something I was conscious of every minute of every day, to the point that half my mind was managing my Parkinson's," he says.

In 2008 he went to Stanford University, where doctors installed a sort of pacemaker that sends current from his chest to two probes in his brain. The device (which Phinney has dubbed "Bob") keeps "neurons from banging around and causing erratic movements in my body. ... It provides a kind of white noise."

Taking a cue from his now-friend, actor Michael J. Fox, who has been a very public advocate for Parkinson's research since his own diagnosis, Phinney established the Davis Phinney Foundation to help people with the disease.

"He was always very humble, down to earth," says friend Carl Worthington, Jr., of Boulder.

Today, with his disease successfully managed without any Parkinson's drugs, Phinney spends his time traveling, enjoying his family, speaking and overseeing the foundation. He also finds time to get out almost every day for "goofball rides on my single-speed bike, sprinting madly through Wonderland Hill to Lee Hill and back."

"Don't get me wrong: I still get great pleasure getting myself to the top of Lee Hill and flying down. ... But by and large my world moves much more slowly. I've come to peace with a lot of what we talk about with the foundation's message -- paying attention to life's little highlights."

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